Most writers and readers think of columns by type of column which is controlled by purpose and audience. One can gain practice in writing by experimenting with rhetorical strategies. One can utilize one rhetorical strategy to produce any type of column.

Ten basic rhetorical strategies are:

1. Analogy and Metaphor
2. Argumentation and Persuasion
3. Cause and Effect
4. Classification
5. Comparison and Contrast
6. Definition
7. Description
8. Exemplification and Illustration
9. Narration
10. Process analysis

To illustrate this concept, let us take the rhetorical strategy of "Definition." One might define the sixteen-year-old in a humor column or "The Student Athlete" as one of America's top sports writers, Red Smith (1905-1982) did. Smith wrote in 1979: "Student athlete is a term susceptible to various definitions. It can mean a biochemistry major who participates in sports, or a Heisman Trophy candidate who is not necessarily a candidate for a bachelor's degree. Some student athletes are more studious than athletic, and vice versa." When can define a term such as "mouse" in all its variations by discipline, connotation and denotation to yield a technology column, a nature column, or a humor column. One can contribute to society's dialogue as did Langston Hughes (1902-1967) with "That Word 'Black'" in 1953.

It must be emphasized that one usually cannot limit one's writing in an essay to one rhetorical strategy. What one tries to do is emphasize one strategy over others in the basic plan for presentation of an idea.

One can use several rhetorical devices within a strategy. For example, "description" and "illustration" are both a rhetorical strategy and a rhetorical device. To define his idea about being black in America, Langston Hughes uses illustration as a device in this paragraph in which the main voice of his column, Jesse B. Simple, speaks: "Next, somebody got up a black-list on which you get if you don't vote right. Then when lodges come into being, the folks they didn't want in them got black-balled. If you kept a skeleton in your closet, you might get black-mailed. And everything bad was black. When it came down to the unlucky ball on the pool table, the eight-rock, they made it the black ball. So no wonder there ain't no equal right for the black man."